I think you have hit the nail on the head why more police funding, more surveillance tech, more dystopian BS that looks more like PreCrime every single day, is only going to get us so far.
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
School quality’s largely in the same place. You’re not going to make much of a dent without fixing social support, the social safety net, healthcare, mental healthcare, and generally greatly improving stability for the economically bottom third or so of families.
In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.
So we have stats, that's the closest we have to objective, but I guess we can't trust those. You say your anecdote contradicts "the stats", and I genuinely believe you. Sincerely, what's the alternative? Vibes? We gotta steer this ship (society) based on something.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.
Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).
Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.
I am the loud exhaust. Where we live the noise pollution is not a concern and I have no complaints around that. Many of my neighbors have lifted trucks and go vroom cars. Ironically the performance cars are the nicest drivers :)
I get it, I used to drive a GTI. I don't mind just loud exhaust by itself, as long as they are tuned well. It's the pops/crackling/backfires that set off all the neighborhood dogs and sound like they split the air that are a scourge around here. These folks also are the ones driving like maniacs in inappropriate contexts.
I dont personally agree but that is a really interesting argument I can kinda get behind. I guess the question is, what if you have footage of a crime being committed, and you would have a great lead if you only had a way to pair a vehicle with a person?
I also don't agree with the argument you replied to, but a counter-argument to your point is that we don't mandate individuals to wear name tags while in public
I'm fine with license plates being read and parsed. I'm fine with license plates being read, parsed, assessed for violation, and ticketed automatically, or cross-checked for amber alerts. That's literally my line of work.
I want strict, strict guardrails on when and where that occurs. I want that information erased as soon as the context of the citation wraps up. I want every company/contractor in this space FOIA-able and held to as strict or stricter requirements than the government for transparency and corruption and other regulation. I don't want every timestamped/geostamped datapoint of every law abiding driver passing into any juncture hoovered into a data lake and tracked and easily queryable. That's (IMHO, IANAL, WTF, BBQ) a flagrant 4th amendment violation, and had the framers been able to conceive such a thing, they'd absolutely add a "and no dragnet surveilance" provision from day 1.
If that seems hypocritical, my line starts with "has a crime occurred with decent likelihood?" "Lets collect everything and go snoopin for crimes" is beyond the pale.
> but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
Two weeks ago, my parked car, along with two other parked cars, was rear-ended at 3:15am by a drunk driver (the car interior smelled like alcohol), in an unregistered car that was not his. He then fled the scene.
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
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What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
Indeed, I already see this in the consumer space with Frigate users. Letting modern cameras handle the inference themselves makes running an NVR easier. Pretty soon all cameras will be this way, and as you say the output will be metadata that is easily collected and correlated. Sounds useful for my personal surveillance system and awful for society.
I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?
We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.
> We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it
Cool, change the First Amendment first. Your face and name aren't private under our existing framework of laws - no standard legislation can change this.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against, let alone surveillance dragnets. I would contend it strongly implies in fact laws should protect and also not chill your ability to:
- go to and from a place of worship
- go to and from a peaceful assembly
- conduct free speech activities
- conduct press/journalism
- petition the government
If anything, the existing framework of laws implies a gap, that data should not be able to be hoovered up without prior authorization, since the existence of such a dragnet with a government possibly adversarial to certain political positions (e.g. labeling "AntiFa" terrorists) has quite the chilling effect on your movement and activity. US vs Jones (2012) ruled a GPS tracker constitutes a 4th Amendment search. If I have no phone on me, and a system is able to track my location precisely walking through a city, does it matter if the trace emitted by that black box is attached to me physically, or part of a distributed system? It's still outputting a dataframe of (timestamp, gps) over a huge area.
> It says nothing directly about privacy, for or against
Freedom of the press is directly related to privacy: if I can see something in public as a private citizen, I can report on it, and you may not create any laws abridging this.
I'm not commenting on surveillance dragnets or how the government uses the data or if the government is prohibited from using it by statute or case law - the First Amendment doesn't apply there (Fourth and Fifth do.)
I don't know how the First Amendment applies, could you elaborate? And assuming it does, that does not seem like an impossible barrier; time, place, and manner restrictions are a thing. And like I said, we already do it at some level.
Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association? Or is the argument that it's private entities and the Constitution only limits the government?
Even in the latter case, at least we could do something about the government using private data collection to do things they are not otherwise permitted to do under the Constitution. That's some BS we should all be on board with stopping.
No law can prevent me from operating a corporation that collects and publishes license plate data for lawful purposes (basic freedom of the press.) If I can see something in public (where no reasonable expectation of privacy exists), I can report on it. Very few exceptions exist to this - think national security or military installations.
> Doesn't mass surveillance plausibly violate the First Amendment, by having a chilling effect on speech and freedom of association?
Plausibly, but no relevant case law I am aware of makes this interpretation.
We can prohibit the government from utilizing and collecting the data: absolutely, but you cannot prevent the people from doing the same.
Alright, I will accept that what you say about license plate data is true (though I know there remains ongoing debate about it, IANAL so I cannot claim to know anything more).
That gets you as far as distributing the license plate, location, and time. But if you combine that data with other non-public data, then it is no longer a First Amendment protected use.
As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country with no effort and store it indefinitely. "No reasonable expectation of privacy" rests on a definition of reasonable that made sense in the 18th century. Our technological progress has changed that calculus.
> As an aside, if we cannot figure out a way to make this fit with the First Amendment as written today, we need to make updating that a priority already. The founders had no idea that we would end up with computers and cameras that could automatically track every citizen of the country
This is a commonly echoed sentiment for the Second Amendment too ("These idiot founders! They could never have imagined so much individual power - We need to take rights away!"), and I am in hard disagreement for both.
I cherish the fact that our legal system is so intentionally slow that these types of "progressive" efforts to reform the Constitution are basically impossible.
The founders clearly intended the second amendment to be about military service, we have contemporary evidence to support that. The idea that it broadly applied to individuals on their own is an interpretation that didn’t really gain steam until well into the 20th century.
Have you ever read any of the Federalist papers? This is extraordinarily ignorant - even left-leaning SCOTUS justices do not agree with you (see Caetano, etc.)
As far as I am aware, there's no Federal law prohibiting the publication of SSNs for lawful purposes (which is the typical default.) In Virginia, Ostergren v. Cuccinelli (4th Cir. 2010) touched on this very issue, and ultimately concluded that publishing SSNs is protected speech (some nuance there, but this was the outcome.)
License plates are explicitly designed for legibility and are legally mandated by every state to be displayed in public view. The entire purpose of this object is to be seen and create accountability. An SSN is a private, individually-issued piece of information that isn't intended for public view - and courts are still saying publication is okay.
Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
I’m surprised that SSNs could be published like that. It’s curious that nobody has attempted to “do a journalism” and publish the SSNs of HNW individuals. It seems there would be little to stop you.
> Law in the United States isn't an autistic, overly-rigid computer system where edge cases can be probed for "gotchas:" judges and case law exist to figure out these tough questions.
That’s obvious, and you seem to be going against yourself here. If some details are considered too sensitive for publication then it would follow that a judge may be able to interpret the law to prevent mass publication of even sensitive public or semi-public data by creating an interpretive carve-out. But if you can publish SSNs then there’s little to no hope for that. It almost seems that the law is “autistically” tilted in favor of data brokers.
Someone ought to set up a tracker that updates a list of known HNW individuals with last detected location based on license plate data and/or facial recognition. Maybe also a list of last detected million dollar+ supercars. That will get some bills started.
Does anyone else find it painfully ironic that the one CO cop said "You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing," [0], in light of the George Floyd BLM rallying cry "I can't breathe!" and the common metaphor describing surveilance states as "suffocating"?
Like what are we doing as a society? Stop trying to build the surveilance nexus from sci fi. I don't want to live in a zero-crime world
[1]. It's not worth it. Safety third, there is always gonna be some risk.
[1] Edit to add: if this raises hackles, I encourage folks to think through what true zero crime (or maybe lets call it six-nines lawfulness) entails. If we had literal precrime, would that stop 99.9999% of crime? (hint: read the book/watch the movie)
While true, I think you have missed the bigger story. If you talk with kids today their mentality is very different from kids of 20-30 years ago, and it's not the cop cameras all over the place. Nobody pays those much mind. It's the fact that damn near everybody over the age of 10 is carrying around a high quality camera all day long and the means to publish that footage worldwide in an instant. It doesn't help that people with an agenda sometimes call for other people to be "cancelled" over even a single video, even a 30 year old video from when they were freshmen in college, and are can be successful in getting that person's life ruined.
We're living constantly in the scene from Fahrenheit 451 where the government asks everybody to go outside at once and report any suspicious activity. We have made it potentially not OK for kids to push boundaries or make mistakes.
That's about the worst, most inflammatory way possible to make your point. I agree with you 100%, but I am begging you to learn to frame your ideas better, in order to get people on your side. If you say that to any voters you will lose them instantly
Noted. But I'm trying to make people think about their cognitive dissonance.
I'm not a politician. I'm a systems thinker. If someone can't reason their way through what a "zero-crime world" actually entails, I doubt my other ideas will get through to them. Zero crime. Zero. No speeding, no IP infringement, no "just this one time". Zero.
That's also why I like asking "why stop there?" We've basically solved surveilance. It's an engineering problem. We have the capacity to track everyone (who does not make a VERY concerted effort to stealth) all the time, almost everywhere.
Didn't lose me, but point taken about gathering more support. How about: the costs of implementing a zero-crime world are far greater than the crime. Or attempting to trade freedom for safety will result in losing both.
Zero-crime means zero things that are banned ever becoming allowed. Things usually become allowed after they are illegal first, but people do them anyway, and then people wonder why we bother punishing them. Think of marijuana legalization. If nobody ever tried to illegally smoke weed, it would never be legalized because there would be no perceived benefit to doing so because it would be obvious that nobody wanted to do it.
That depends on the municipality and who decides to show up to meetings and make a big deal about it. If enough people get freaked out by these cameras it’s gonna cause real problems for elected officials who enable them.
The people who show up to town council meetings lean heavily to the side of security over liberty. The most obvious reason is that it's mostly retired homeowners with busybody personality types.
Privacy and liberty advocates are unlikely to win in council meetings by sheer numbers. They get some leverage with campaign donations, especially recently that Bitcoin made a lot of such people rich.
This really depends on where you live. I have no doubt that on average you’re correct but a lot of those retired homeowners are pretty upset about how the feds are behaving recently and believe it or not when your material needs are met some people actually try to use their privilege to help those most likely to be victimized by the surveillance state
I live in a very liberty minded county. The kind of place with no building codes and pretty much no police. All our cameras on county/municipal property were voted disabled.
So the feds just put their flock cameras anywhere they had a little piece of federal property, and there is no way to vote those ones off. They have little patches that cover the highways and some main thoroughfares. It's everywhere.
I don't agree. I watched a concerted effort, involving a good deal of public comment (which: not a very effective tool for change; you have better tools in your arsenal), and vanishingly little of it took the "there's always going to be risk, crime isn't everything" tack. "This stuff doesn't work and causes more problems than it solves" is the effective answer, not this George Floyd stuff.
It's unpopular with residents. Residents do not have the attitude towards crime reflected in the comment I replied to. It's a very online thing to say.
Yeah perhaps it's a bit inflammatory and terminally online of me to say. But it's true. Zero crime means zero crime. Minority report levels of surveilance and policing.
What stance would you recommend? You're one of the folks here i recognize immediatedy and have a wealth of wisdom.
You're 100% correct, and in fact I think you've touched upon partly explaining why fascism and authoritarianism is not just on the doorstep, it's got a foot in the door (without a warrant) and is asking^W trying to force its way in saying "it's just a quick search, you have nothing to hide cause you're not doing anything wrong, are you?"
Realism isn't very palatable. Most folks want to stay in their little rat race lane and push their little skinner box lever and get their little variable interval algorithmic treato, and they are content with that. That's fine. It's just a shame they gotta tighten the noose around absolutely everyone else for a morsel of safety.
I don't agree with basically any of this. I don't think people who oppose crime, or recoil from arguments suggesting deliberate tradeoffs involving more crime, are stuck in little skinner boxes.
I'm probably not doing a great job of getting my point across, and most of that is on me. Let me try to clarify.
Every aspect of cybernetics (whether it be engineering, society/politics, biology) involves deliberate tradeoffs. In metaphor, we have a big knob with "liberty/crime" on one side and "surveillance/safety" on the other. It's highly nonlinear and there are diminishing returns at both extrema. Everyone (subconsciously) has some ideal point where they think that crime-o-stat should be set.
I'm saying don't turn it up to 11, and it's already set pretty high. It's increasingly technologically possible, and I think it's a bad thing to chase the long tail. I'm pretty happy with where we are at the present, but corporations keep marketing we need more cameras, more detection, more ALPRs, more algos, more predictive policing, more safety, who doesn't want to be more safe? I think it's very precarious.
I reiterate: it's uncomfortable, but I don't want to live in a world with zero crimes because everyone has probably committed crimes without even knowing it. The costs, both fiscal and in terms of civil liberties, of chasing ever-decreasing-crime are far higher than finding some stable setpoint that balances privacy and liberty with measures that justly deter crime. Let us not let the cure become worse than the disease.
Refusing to return escaped slaves used to be illegal. Inter-racial marriage used to be illegal. Gay marriage and even gay relationships used to be illegal. Crime is not necessarily wrong.
Order and peace sounds great! But that's just road crime, why stop there? We have so many wifi enabled nodes and cameras. Lets put alpr on every Waymo and Tesla. Gait detection and face recognition on every Ring. Triangulate every cell phone down to the meter. Dump it all in a big data watershed. Let anyone with username/password query it (no MFA needed). We could even name our panopticon after some mythical all-seeing artifact, like a palantir. You won't be able to take a breath without officials knowing.
Decreasingly so. Particularly if I am going to anything charged (e.g. political rallies). Which is a shame, they are very useful tools and it's a very real chilling effect.
The poster above asked why you personally support total surveillance, despite it being ripe for abuse. How inevitable something may or may not be is completely irrelevant to whether you personally choose to support it. Acknowledging that it can be abused means you have to make that logical connection and say why something being ripe for abuse doesn't preclude you from cheering on for it.
This is why I love this site. You get input from so many specialized folks! I appreciate you contributing your expertise and I also appreciate you calling out the limits to that knowledge.
Two points I'm hoping you can help clarify:
> Researchers ... found that an increased fMRI signal is associated with reduced brain activity in around 40 percent of cases.
So it's not just that they found it was uncorrelated, they found it was anticorrelated in 40% of cases?
And you are suggesting that conclusion suffers from the same potential issues as these fMRI studies in general?
Like you mention, it seems to me if we wanted to really validate the model, we'd have to run the same experiment with two, three, or maybe even more different modalities (fMRI, PET with different tracers, etc).
I'm sure there are exceptions, but I think most folks (including criminals) believe crime is, generally speaking, bad. Folks commit crimes to survive, to enrich themselves, out of retribution, out of lapse of judgment, or lack of self control. Almost all some flavor of unmet needs. You put money into tackling those challenges, address why people are stealing, why turf wars break out, why addiction ruins lives and puts people in terrible positions, why poor nutrition and family support and mental health care lead to so many folks slipping through the cracks.
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